In April, reacting nastily to the good feelings prevalent at the opening of the Bush Library, the journalist Carl Bernstein could not avoid referring to Iraq as an "insane war" caused largely by "Jewish neocons who wanted to remake the world". Even his host on the left-leaning MSNBC cable network rebuked him (noting that George Tenet, George Bush and Dick Cheney were not Jewish), but the feeling is there: critics of neoconservatism far too often fall into anti-Semitic tropes.

With enemies like these the success of neoconservatism, at least in remaining alive and influential, is not incomprehensible. To take the GOP first, one problem the realpolitik school has is that its main proponents are about 90 years old. Vin Weber noted that leaders of the alternative realist school "seem like some celibate religious sect, unable or disinclined to reproduce". Conversely, as Justin Vaisse explained, "neoconservatism is regenerating itself and keeping a balanced age pyramid. Its idealistic and patriotic appeal may be better suited to attract young thinkers than the prudent and reasonable calculations of realism." And he added that this "demographic dynamism is also true in terms of institutions and publications". On the Democratic side, neocons, as Vaisse says, "offer the most clear-cut alternative to the current administration". 

When the administration was young this may have seemed simply like Republicans critcising a Democrat. But now in year five of Obama, the neocon critique finds reverberations among Democrats as well. Too many of the administration's policies — outreach to Iran and to Russia, passivity in Syria, failure to support democratic forces in Iran and more recently Egypt — are making Democrats nervous. A policy of American weakness, a desire to remain out of the fray, and a deeply dubious assessment of American morality may have seemed just the ticket to defeat the GOP in 2008, reacting to George W. Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But will such policies bring victory in 2016, when Obama is gone and those wars are behind the United States? Within the Democratic Party there remain internationalists, many of them associated with the Clinton years, and indeed Hillary Clinton herself may be the next Democratic candidate. She is no neocon, but she does appear to be far closer than Obama to the view that Madeline Albright, her husband's secretary of state, espoused when she called the United States the "indispensable nation".

A more trenchant and interesting criticism of neoconservatism than the personal smears and anti-Semitism coming from parts of the enraged Right and Left is that from what John Bolton called the "national security Republicans" in last month's Standpoint ("America's isolationists endanger the West"). Bolton claimed that "neocons do not dominate Republican thinking any more than isolationists do, despite the media hype". Here we simply disagree, and I find Weber's conclusion ("dominant intellectual force") more persuasive. Listen to the Republican officials debating during the 2012 campaign, or discussing Syria in 2012 and 2013, and that much seems clear. War-weariness is always a powerful sentiment, as it was after Vietnam. But it passes. And so will that element of Republican reluctance to support overseas actions that is in fact a vote of no confidence in the sitting President. I too would shrink from having Barack Obama as commander-in-chief in any new conflict, given the administration's record in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Mali, and Syria of reluctance to engage forcefully enough to win.